UCLA In the News November 2, 2017

Color of Change commissioned Darnell Hunt, Dean of Social Sciences and Professor of Sociology and African American Studies at UCLA to produce this report, which also includes a foreward from Mara Brock Akil, who, along with her husband Salim Akil, runs the CW’s upcoming new superhero drama “Black Lightning.” (Also: Ebony, KCRW-FM, W Magazine)

Yet new research from the UCLA WORLD Policy Analysis Center finds that despite some advances — such as equal pay laws or equal opportunity for disabled individuals — widespread discrimination continues to grip the workplace.

Twenty-two percent of transgender adults in California have ever attempted suicide, compare with 4 percent of cisgender (nontrans) adult Californians, according to the policy brief from the Williams Institute, a think tank at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research. The report, released today, uses data from the 2015-2016 California Health Interview Survey. (Also: California Healthline)

“In those days there was no transparency in campaign contributions. In fact, there was probably no transparency on bribes. It was a very corrupt system. There were a number of prominent Californians who developed this reform movement. The torch was taken by Hiram Johnson, who was to become the governor of California,” said UCLA’s Zev Yaroslavsky. (Approx. 12:20 mark)

Around the University of California–Los Angeles campus, assistant researcher Melanie Barboni is known as a hummingbird whisperer. On her first day on the job, she put up a hummingbird feeder outside her office window and is now visited daily by 200 birds. According to Barboni, the tiny, colorful creatures will let her hold them and see their nests.

“Health care is not affordable for us at the rate it’s going now,” said Johnese Spisso, president of UCLA Health and CEO of UCLA Hospital System. “We need to use research and innovation [to figure out] how to reduce the cost of care while improving quality,” she said, adding that health care systems cannot simply rely on the federal government.

UCLA psychiatrist Charles Grob, the first academic to receive federal approval to conduct research on psilocybin as a possible treatment of anxiety in adults with cancer, said previously that we could be playing with fire here. “It can become dangerous very quickly,” he said.

It started with Ben Zuckerman, professor emeritus of astronomy at the University of California, Los Angeles. He was preparing a talk about the compositions of planets and smaller rocky bodies outside our solar system for a July 2014 symposium at the invitation of Jay Farihi, whom he had helped supervise when Farihi was a graduate student at UCLA.

“A big part of our emotions are probably influenced by the nerves in our gut,” says Emeran Mayer, professor of physiology, psychiatry and biobehavioural sciences at UCLA in a Scientific American article.